Responsive Business

In a presentation I delivered in mid 2016, I had this slide about automating or eliminating analysis, design, testing and deployment from the traditional IT process. I was making my point to software developers and architects. I proposed to them that all manual activities other than development (writing code) and gathering user feedback were a form of waste (mura, muda, muri). Needless to say the proposition was met with plenty of surprise.

Flip to 2017. AWS recently released a new product named Codestar. In the introductory blog post to Codestar, AWS Blogger Tara Walker makes the following statements.

Finally, most companies desire to increase the speed of their software development and reduce the time to market by adopting best practices around continuous integration and continuous delivery. Implementing these agile development strategies may require companies to spend time in educating teams on methodologies and setting up resources for these new processes.

With AWS CodeStar, development teams can build an agile software development workflow that not only increases the speed in which teams can deploy software and bug fixes, but also enables developers to build software that is more inline with customers’ requests and needs.

Tara goes on to describe a “responsive development workflow” that developers can utilize using AWS Codestar. In that description (assisted by a neat diagram), she clearly shows that customers are a source of “Ideas, Requests and Bugs”. That is similar to the idea of the “Derive” feedback loop in my picture in this post. She also describes through out the blog post how many aspects of development can be automated or made frictionless via AWS Codestar. That is similar to the idea of “Automate or Eliminate” in my picture in this post.

This is great. It is great that someone the size of Amazon is, in a way, promoting the concept of Responsive Development Workflow. This new term “Responsive Development Workflow” is the sum effect of recent innovations in IT processes. It is the sum effect of Agile Methodology, Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Infrastructure as Code and the Lean Build, Measure, Learn ideas. It is no longer good enough to “do Agile” or write Infrastructure as Code. Instead, those who put all of that together stand to win big.

At FastUp we are working on the next generation of Responsive Development Workflow for our customers who want to become a “Responsive Business”. A Responsive Business is a business that truly listens to its customers and provides the right solution at the right time and the right place. We are excited to be here.